Fast-growing cybersecurity startups Silverfort and Torq raise new funding
Silverfort Ltd. and Torq Technologies Ltd., two cybersecurity startups that logged triple-digit revenue growth last year, have raised fresh capital to continue their sales momentum.
The companies announced their respective funding rounds today. Tel Aviv- and Boston-based Silverfort provides software that helps enterprises protect employee accounts from hacking attempts. New York-based Torq offers a platform that can automate common cybersecurity tasks such as detecting malware.
AI-driven IAM security
Silverfort raised $116 million in Series D funding from a consortium led by Brighton Park Capital. According to the company, the round also included the participation of over a half-dozen other backers, including the venture capital arms of Citibank NA and General Motors Co. Silverfort’s total outside funding now stands at $222 million.
Enterprises use IAM, or identity and access management tools, to power the accounts they create for employees in internal business applications. Silverfort provides a platform that can connect to a company’s IAM tools and map out all the employee accounts they manage. The platform then uses artificial intelligence to find potential cybersecurity risks.
According to Silverfort, its AI models spot employee accounts that may have been compromised by hackers. The company’s platform also detects accounts that haven’t been breached but include insecure access permissions. It can, for example, identify unnecessary permissions that provide access to sensitive applications not needed for an employee’s work.
The company also promises to ease the task of managing service accounts, which are used by applications to interact with one another. Its platform uses AI to find all the service accounts in a company’s environment. From there, it searches for cybersecurity risks such as malicious usage patterns.
“Some of the world’s largest enterprises now trust Silverfort to protect their corporate identities, including multiple Fortune 25 companies, with more than 100 new customers joining us each quarter,” co-founder and Chief Executive Hed Kovetz wrote in a blog post today.
Silverfort says the increased demand boosted its annual recurring revenue by tens of millions of dollars last year. To sustain that momentum, it will use the $116 million funding round announced today to grow its workforce and build more features. The company also plans to forge more channel partnerships.
Cybersecurity hyperautomation
Torq provides a so-called hyperautomation platform of the same name. The platform makes it possible to create software workflows for automating common cybersecurity tasks. Torq-powered workflows can, for example, recover files encrypted by ransomware and block malicious login requests.
The company has raised $42 million in funding as an extension to a Series B funding round that first closed three years ago. The new raise saw the participation of Bessemer Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Insight Partners, Greenfield Partners and Evolution Equity Partners. it has received a total of $120 million from investors since launching in 2020.
On occasion of the raise, Torq disclosed that its annual recurring revenue tripled in 2023. The company claims to have grown its customer count by a factor of five in the same time frame. It didn’t reveal more specific numbers. Torq’s installed base now includes publicly traded enterprise software makers such as HashiCorp Inc. and SentinelOne Inc., as well as multiple Fortune 100 companies.
The past year also saw Torq significantly upgrade its platform’s core feature set. The company added a new AI tool, Socrates, that it promises will automate certain advanced cybersecurity tasks. For instance, the tool can analyze the data that an antivirus collects about a file to determine whether it’s malicious and alert administrators if necessary.
“2023 was a year of dramatic customer and revenue focus, product innovation and expansion, and channel and partner momentum, yielding the strongest year for Torq since it was founded,” said co-founder and CEO Ofer Smadari. “We doubled our sales and go-to-market teams to accommodate this fantastic growth.”
Image: Pixabay
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.
One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.
Join our community on YouTube
Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.
THANK YOU